There is always something interesting to take picture of...but you need to get out. Pentax K-3 and DA*60-250.

Email: brqyvn@gmail.com 

 Hi Photographer friends,

It's been a long week and I wasn't in a position to go out and take some pictures. Today, I had to get away and find something interesting to shoot. I am not in a particularly photogenic area and wondered what to look for. I could have gone in town and take street photography, but where I currently am , I might have goten in trouble.

I drove toward the country side. This area is known for dairy farms.  However, I had no intentions  of taking pictures of cows. 

I drove for a while, but there wasn't much else than dairy farms and cows as far as I could see. I spotted a man-man lake just beside one of the dairy farms. There was a bunch of birds standing in the shallow dirty water.  The reflection was great. I took one shot and the birds took off. I capture another shot as they were flying away. All and all, I like the two images. They were taken with my Pentax K-3 and the DA* 16-250mm.

Driving back, I passed a sod farm and took a picture of the irrigation system. Although it's more of an industrial image, I like the effect.

The moral of the above post is that there is always something interesting to shoot. You just need to get out and look around.

After my wife looked on the Audubon Bird website, we found that the birds are Black-necked Stilt birds.
Read more about them here: http://birds.audubon.org/birds/black-necked-stilt

Thank you for reading,

Yvon Bourque

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Our Facebook page is updated more often with news about Ricoh / Pentax.

Click here to see or purchase our e-books for Pentax DSLRs.

Sometimes you get carried away and take pictures you shouldn't have. Pentax K-20D

Email: brqyvn@gmail.com 

 Hi Photographer friends,


Through the years, I took thousands and thousands of pictures. I was just looking at my files with the goal of deleting pictures that had no meaning or were duds. My hard drives are almost full.

Looking at the old images, I wondered why I had taken some of the images. I posted four images that I shouldn't have taken. It was a good idea at the time but looking back, I was wrong.

This rattle snake was about three feet from me.
It was stupid of me to take the shot.
The snake could have jumped in a split second and bite me.

These two nuns were just walking along in a public place in Florida.
I thought it would make an interesting picture.
However, I obviously invaded their privacy. 

I know it's a dog, but I believed it knew how pitiful it looked.
I embarrassed it.

Maybe it wasn't the brightest idea to take a picture of guys carrying machine guns.

Thanks for reading,

Yvon Bourque

Visit us on Facebook and  like us. 

Our Facebook page is updated more often with news about Ricoh / Pentax.

Click here to see or purchase our e-books for Pentax DSLRs.

Car show at the RV park we are currently staying at - Pentax K-3 with the DA*16-50mm.

Email: brqyvn@gmail.com

 Hi Photographer friends,

We are currently in an RV park in the Temecula Valley, California. This morning, they had a car show.  I brought my K-3 and took pictures of some of my favorites. As you can see, I increased the saturation and added white vignetting to make the cars stand out. 

I uploaded the images on my computer and then I transferred them to my iPad. I went back and showed the images to the cars individual owner. They were all surprised on how a little post processing made their prized possession look really good. I emailed each one of them a copy of their car picture. 

There were more great cars, but the above are my favorites.

Thanks for reading,

Yvon Bourque

Visit us on Facebook and  like us. 

Our Facebook page is updated more often with news about Ricoh / Pentax.

Click here to see or purchase our e-books for Pentax DSLRs.

We are approaching retirement on the road...with cameras.

Email: brqyvn@gmail.com

 Hi Photographer friends,

Well...we're almost there. At the end of this Month, we are officially retiring from our regular jobs and will hit the road with our RV. With my Pentax photography arsenal, I will now have all the time I want to take photographs all across this Country and Canada. I will have all the time to post all kind of useful "How to" for improving anyone's photography skills. My best images will be posted in a gallery linked to this site for sale at a minimum price for anyone to enjoy or use in advertisement.

I am aiming at getting equipment from Pentax, on loan, to test in actual field conditions. I'm not much of a "Measurebator" and don't worry much about  specifications of equipment, to a certain point. To me, it's the results you get by using your equipment in real life situations, not from scientific tests. 

We will be traveling to  every State or Province at one time or another and you know photo opportunities are going to be everywhere. What a good way to use lens from extreme wide angle to extreme telephoto. 

I will continue to write e-books for the Pentax brand of cameras and maybe some other brands as well. It seems  that since Ricoh purchased Pentax, the landscape has changed. I need the equipment on loan while I write a new e-book and that is becoming really hard with the new management of Ricoh/Pentax. The recent announcement from Ricoh that the Company will no longer bear the Pentax name as of August 1st, has me wondering where this is going to lead to. Remember Sony and Minolta?

Never-the-less, I have been a Pentax user all my life and will continue doing so. 

Along with this Pentax Blog, I also started a new blog, "The Long Way Home" in which I will document our travel with images, videos and write-ups about the places we visits, our adventures (Good and not-so-good) and anything we think you'd like. It will also be a way for family and friends to keep up with us.

This is going to be the adventure of our life (Anne and I) and I waited so long for it. I wanted to do that when I got out of College, but life took me in other directions, but thankfully, I will live the dream now.

Look for daily posting soon and also visit us on the new blog "The Long Way Home".

Thank you for reading and visiting this site for the last six years or so, and I hope you will continue to do so. The site will be more dynamic that ever.

Now that we will be traveling, we might have the pleasure to meeting with some of you along the long way home, sometimes.

Yvon Bourque

My friends, document your life, as it goes by a lot faster than you can imagine

Email: brqyvn@gmail.com

 Hi Photographer friends,

I have been involved in photography, one way or another, since I was a teenager. I've always used Pentax cameras from the get go. I was looking at my shoe-boxes of print the other day, as I want to put my pictures in order and leave them to my two grown daughters, while I'm still kicking. I worked hard all those years learning the craft of photography and I think I succeeded in shooting fairly good images regularly. I shouldn't toot my own horn, and I'm not. I judge my images by the compliments I received.

Never-the-less, while looking at these pictures, I realized that about 90% of them were about scenes, places I visited, landscapes, beautiful sunsets, rare cars, and all kind of "people-less" images. Since I was often the picture taker, I have practically no pictures of myself. I have some pictures of my loved ones and friends, but that's about 10% of the pictures.

It's a little late to go back, and the precious moments I missed are only stored in my memory. I can't share them with anyone. Beautiful images of places, landscapes, sun sets, etc, are a dime a dozen. Pictures documenting your life are priceless.

My friends, document your life, as it goes by a lot faster than you can imagine. Take pictures of your children, your parents and your friends. You will cherish them later on in your life. Don't just take digital images, and  save them on your computer. Gather the images you like best and have them printed, then do it the old fashion way by storing them in albums or shoe-boxes.  There are no electronic in paper prints and unless your place burns down along with the pictures, you should be able to keep them for all of your life and pass them on to your children who could pass them on to their children, and so on. These are irreplaceable and actually in case of a fire, you need to save the people and pets first, immediately followed by your photo albums / shoe-boxes.

The current generation does take more pictures than any generation that preceded them, but they share them on Facebook, emails or saved them on  volatile hard drive, DVDs, memory sticks, or web sites that may not be there next week.  Trust me, the old way of making prints and putting them in albums is still the best way to conserve your precious memories. Computers will continue to evolve and the SDHC cards or DVDs and hard drives you use today may not be compatible with what will be available twenty years from now. Computers and storing devices will crash for sure, sooner or later. That is a fact, as mechanical and electronic devices all fail eventually.

I am using this blog to encourage my own daughters to listen to my advice. They do send me images of them and my grand children all the time, and I love that. I am making a printed album of them, but I urge them to get prints made out. There is so much joy in looking at photo albums or sorting through shoe-boxes full of old pictures. It brings family together. Twenty years from now, those pictures will be priceless. If you think twenty years is a long way ahead, just wait till you get there. You will be amazed as to how fast you got there. When you look forward, time seems to go so slow, but when you look backward, it's amazing how fast it went.

Here's some images of my daughters and some my girls sent me, not necessarily taken with a good ole Pentax camera, but mostly on their cell phones. Some images are from my shoe-boxes, when they were little girls.  (I will post about the cell phone phenomenon versus DSLR cameras in a future post.)

My girls at a very young age. (Scanned prints)

My girls a little older, showing sisterly love.  (Scanned prints)

My girls not so long ago. (Electronic file)

The following images are all priceless, but I don't think they were made in prints.

Will they still be available twenty years from now?

(Electronic file)

(Electronic file)

(Electronic file)

(Electronic file)

(Electronic file)

 (Electronic file)

(Electronic file)

Thank you for reading,

Yvon Bourque

Take a look at my e-books for Pentax Cameras. 

http://www.alettaphoto.com/categories/e%252dbooks/

They include the Pentax K-5, K-01 and the K-30.

Email: brqyvn@gmail.com 

Hi Photographer friends,

The K-30 makes it easy to take pictures in any weather condition.

Although the images below have not necessarily been taken with the K-30, they were taken in adverse conditions and Pentax DSLRs have been weather sealed for years, way ahead of the competition.

Blowing sand

Water worst than rain

Fog

Snow

Extreme humidity and heat

Water up to my neck

Rain and fog

Extreme cold , minus 20 degree F

Desert condition, dry, sandy, hot and windy

Humid and sandy

105 degree F

Cold night @ 7000 ft elevation

Misty

Very cold and windy

Maine winter in February

Thanks for looking,

Yvon Bourque